Summer Reading

Summer doesn’t officially end until September 22nd, but for me it always pretty much ends when I return to school around Labor Day. With the start of school my reading time goes steeply downhill for the first few weeks. Then as the rhythm of the year starts to settle, I can usually pick up a few minutes here and there to squeeze some reading in. I have been doing pretty good this summer posting 5-6 days a week and I hope to keep that up, but there may be some weeks that that doesn’t happen. My apologies in advance.

I read a lot of books this summer, according to Goodreads it is around 40 books for July and August. I really wish that Goodreads would show it’s statistics in months not the full year. There are other things I would like their statistics to do, but that is another post. Many of those 40 were really good and I wrote reviews for most of them. I still have a few from the end of August I haven’t had a chance to write up yet, but I will.

Instead of listing all 40 books here, I thought I would just let you know my top 10 from July and August.

Traveling News

I did some traveling in August and of course visited some bookish places. I first went to Manzanita on the Oregon coast. This is a quaint little town just south of Cannon Beach. They have a great beach and some nice houses for rent. It is very close to the beach where they filmed the last scene in the original Point Break, the one that is suppose to be in Australia, and where they filmed the beach scene in Twilight that is suppose to be La Push, WA. It is a very cool beach. It is part of Ecola State Park which is a lovely park with 2 or 3 beaches and some camping sites as well. On a good day there is even surfing and on a really good day, really good surfing.

For a small town book store they have quite the nice collection that is pretty up to date with lots of new releases. If you are in the neighborhood I highly suggest visiting.

I then spent time in Connecticut visiting family. While there I went to two bookish places. The first was the Book Barn in Niantic. This is the biggest used book store I think I have ever been in. It is actually multiple buildings with lots of gardens with lots of fun things in them, goats and cats. It was such a fun place, I could have easily spent an entire day there.

At first it looks like a jumbled mess, but each building houses a certain type of book. There was an entire building for supernatural books called Hades, there was another for mysteries and another for romances, you get the idea. Most of the upstairs of the barn is where the YA is. They also have another building down the road that was just for children’s books. In fact there are about 3 other stores in town that are all within walking distance of the original. All of the main buildings are surrounded by gardens and other fun things for kids and adults. They have a Scavenger hunt for the kids. The goats are as friendly as goats can be. The cats were hiding the day I was there, but I did spot a couple sleeping in one of the gardens. If all of that has not made you want to visit, here is the best part and why it is worth the trip, all of their paperback are only $1! Yes, that is correct! Most of their hardcovers are reasonably priced as well, the ones I bought were $4 and $3 dollars each. All of the books I looked at were in good to excellent condition and all of us who went found a few treasures to take home with us. It was a fun time and I will be going back next year. I might need to bring a bigger suitcase though.

I also visited Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but I will save that for a post next week. It was an amazing place and it deserves a post all of its own.

Well that was my summer of reading and traveling. I hope your summer was as productive and fun as mine.

We read Lord of Shadows and One Dark Throne as well! Definitely two of our top summer reads! And we are planning to read Eliza and Her monsters this month, so we are so happy to hear you enjoyed it! We are really excited about it!